The First Rule of EAT Club is DON’T TALK ABOUT EAT CLUB.

The Second Rule of EAT Club is DON’T TALK ABOUT EAT CLUB.

But I digress.

There I was in the Financh all set to “welcome” yet another a new corporate shuttle to the ‘hood, you know, with the two-inch main blade of my Victorinox Swiss Champ right into the sidewalls of the rear tires when I discovered that it’s actually some sort of food delivery bus.

Then I didn’t know what to do.

Jay Barmann of Grub Street has the deets on this Big New Thing.

As seen yesterday in the 94111:

Click to expand

“EAT Club Eats up the Valley - Announces $5 Million Series A Funding Led by August Capital

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–EAT Club, a leading food tech company that brings delicious lunches to professionals, announced today that it has raised a $5 million Series A funding led by August Capital with participation from First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures, Mark Vadon (Co-Founder of Blue Nile & Zulily) and angel investors. Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital joins Rob Hayes of First Round Capital on the Company’s Board of Directors. First Round Capital led the Company’s Seed Financing in 2011.

EAT Club is an innovative ecommerce service that presents an always-changing daily assortment of lunches to its members via its website and mobile services. Members who order lunch enjoy a freshly prepared restaurant meal, delivered to their office between 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., without the issues of a minimum order size or food not showing up on time. EAT Club merges technology with an exclusive network of quality restaurant partners to create a curated, convenient experience for members, while providing restaurants with a profitable new revenue stream and significant consumer exposure. EAT Club delivers to over 1,500 California Bay Area companies and powers corporate lunch programs and group meetings for customers like Chegg, Bloomreach, Gunderson Dettmer, and IMVU.

“This is an incredibly exciting time for EAT Club. We’ve built a product that our members love, have an amazing group of people, and that is translating into very fast growth. We’ve been experiencing consistent double-digit month-over-month growth,” said Frank Han, EAT Club’s CEO. “With this funding, we will more aggressively pursue our vision of making great food available and accessible to people everywhere. What we’ve done so far is just the beginning.”

Leading the financing round, August Capital Partner Howard Hartenbaum believes that EAT Club’s Internet-based logistics technology is tackling a growing lunch problem that affects more than 70 million professionals by helping them get a wide selection of healthy and tasty foods at work without needing to plan ahead. “EAT Club fuses technology to capitalize on untapped restaurant inventory and real-time member reviews and feedback to create a product that is simply awesome. Employees are no longer forced to eat a catered selection they didn’t want, now each employee can select their individual EAT Club choice each day.”

About EAT Club

EAT Club is a leading food tech company that makes lunch fun, exciting, delicious and super easy. EAT Club’s unique concept allows members to choose handpicked lunches that fit their lifestyles and receive their lunch by 12:30 p.m. Founded in 2010 by Kevin Yang and Rodrigo Santibanez as Stanford Graduate Students, EAT Club currently delivers lunches to more than 1,500 companies in the California Bay Area. For more information, visit www.myeatclub.com. EAT Club has received funding from August Capital, First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures, Mark Vadon (Co-Founder of Blue Nile & Zulily) along with angel investors.

Contacts

SS|PR for EAT Club
Tony Keller, 312-759-0858
SVP
tkeller@sspr.com

Daily lunch at the office can be a hassle. It’s time-consuming, repetitive, and potentially unhealthy and expensive if you’re pressed for time. At the same time, there are all these great restaurants in the neighborhood, but driving there would take too much time.

Fortunately, EAT Club is here to make daily lunch delicious, convenient, and affordable. Just visit myeatclub.com, choose from a rotating set of featured restaurants and healthy daily options, and your food shows up by 12:30 like magic.

Join fellow office workers at over 2,000 other companies like Sony, Shutterfly, and Kaiser Permanente and discover affordable and reliable lunch delivery.

We created EAT Club to address a frustration we personally felt as busy office workers, that there were no convenient, delicious, and affordable lunch options available to us. At Kevin’s last job, the only quick options were the uninspired deli in the basement and the McDonalds down the street. More than once, he resorted to raiding the vending machine.

While there were good restaurants within driving distance, it was hard to get in a car for lunch without losing an hour out of the day. Kevin and his colleagues looked into lunch delivery a couple times, but found that the minimum orders and unreliable service made it too expensive and cumbersome for daily use.

It was based on this personal experience that we decided to combine a love of good affordable food, novel use of technology and data, and a commitment to consistent service to make lunch delivery an attractive option for all our fellow office workers out there.

You can order one lunch for yourself or a hundred lunches for your company. Sign up for free, order your first lunch and start believing.

Kevin and Rodrigo
EAT Club Founders

Frank Han, CEO

As CEO, Frank is helping EAT Club change how people eat lunch at work. Frank is a long-time eCommerce industry leader. Prior to joining EAT Club, Frank was CEO of Swoopo.com, the innovative inventor and leader of pay-per-bid auctions. He was founder and CEO of Glimpse.com, a fashion shopping portal that was sold to TheFind. Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President and General Manager of HSN.com, the online business of the Home Shopping Network, where he drove growth to over $350 million in annual revenue by embracing HSN’s multi-channel opportunity. In 1996, Frank cofounded eToys.com, the pioneering online retailer that grew from zero to over $200 million in revenue and IPO’ed in 1999. He served as COO and SVP of Product Development.

Frank earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and his BS from Yale University.

Kevin Yang, Co-Founder

Kevin is an experimental cooking enthusiast and low-key restaurant connoisseur. To support these hobbies, he has held odd jobs throughout the years, including stints in management consulting, venture capital, computational biology research, and classical Chinese translation. His qualifications to be a lunch delivery guy include an MBA from Stanford and a BA from Harvard.

Rodrigo Santibanez, Co-Founder

Rodrigo’s adventurous appetite has given him an extended food curriculum, ranging from traditional recipes to the most exotic dishes from around the world. He developed a crazy appetite for spicy food while growing up in southern Mexico. His background as a Finance Analyst taught him the most efficient methods of ordering food in late office hours, and his experience at a consumer goods company in Italy refined his taste for Neapolitan cuisine. Rodrigo studied his MBA at Stanford University, where he enjoyed the amusing results of mixing Asian, Indian and Latin American cuisines in the same student dormitory.

Press

• Forbes - 9 Awesome Apps for Your Startup Office Manager (Mar. 5, 2013)
• San Mateo Patch - Local Start-Up Solves Lunch Hour Dilemmas (Jun. 8, 2012)
• AllThingsD - At Silicon Valley Companies, There’s Certainly Such a Thing as a Free Lunch — For Employees(Feb. 15, 2012)
• NBC Bay Area - Point, Click and Eat at Work (Nov. 30, 2011)
• San Mateo Daily Journal - Eat Club targets office desk diners (Nov. 28, 2011)

Investors

• First Round Capital
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Launch Capital
• Siemer Ventures
• Tekton Ventures
• Brian Lee (founder of ShoeDazzle and LegalZoom)
• Niren Hiro (AdMob)
• Aki Sano (Founder of Cookpad)
• Michael Kinsbergen (CEO of Nedstat, acquired by comScore)